Book Review

Everest - The First Ascent

Ebury Press, pp400, ISBN 9781846043482
The untold story of Griffith Pugh, the man who made it possible
by Harriet Tuckey

Despite the title, this is not a book about Everest. It is a biography of Griffith Pugh, perhaps best known as the physiologist on the 1953 Everest Expedition, by his daughter Harriet Tuckey. "The man who made it possible" may sound a bit extreme, but it's a fair summary of flattering comments made in 1993 by Michael Ward, the 1953 Expedition Doctor, at the 40th anniversary celebrations. Prior to this, in most of the publicity about the expedition, Pugh had been ignored or treated with suspicion and ridicule.

To help produce the book, Tuckey has tracked down a wide range of previously unseen diaries and letters and rare archive material and interviewed several of the Everest '53 team.

Pugh, a mountaineer as well as a physiologist, had worked in WW2 as an organiser of ski troops and how to improve their performance under extreme conditions. He moved on from there to a scientific study of mountaineering, taking part in the 1952 Cho Oyu expedition which was in part a trial run for Everest 53.

Among the contributions stemming from Pugh's research, mostly carried out under the auspices of the Medical Research Council, were major improvements in diet, hygiene, boots, tents, clothing and how to use oxygen systems. He also developed the crucial idea that drinking large amounts of water was critical, and devised the acclimatisation programme that Hunt used. Many of his proposals ran counter to the accepted stiff-upper-lip ideas of the pre-war and early post-war English climbing establishment, and he had an ambivalent relationship with both Hunt and Hillary, who relied extensively on his work but who both felt they had to downplay his role and his scientific ideas.

Afterwards he carried out research with the armed forces, channel swimmers, mountain walkers and athletes preparing for the high-altitude Mexico City Olympics. He transformed our understanding of hypothermia, overturning the previously accepted idea that it was primarily a result of a poor attitude in favour of the now universally-accepted need to use waterproof clothing and shelter to keep as dry as possible. There had been quite a few deaths from hypothermia during the early years of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme until Pugh's research into their causes became accepted and widely adopted. Together with Hillary, he planned the successful "Silver Hut" expedition, which overwintered at 19,000 feet on Makalu and conducted extensive research there himself.

Pugh was irascible and easy to dislike, and had fraught relationships with many people, including some from the climbing establishment and some from the senior staff at the MRC, his employers. His daughter had an "uncomfortable, uncommunicative coexistence" with him through childhood and until his death. A subtext of the book is a fascinating slant on their awkward father-daughter relationship.

"Everest - The First Ascent" won the 2013 Boardman Tasker Award and several other book prizes.

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